Roadwork

“Well Christ, Bart, couldn’t you have taken him down another day?”

He knocked back the rest of his drink. “I didn’t see the point.”

“You didn’t see the-” Ordner couldn’t finish. He set his glass down and shook his head, like a man who has been punched. “Bart, do you know what it’s going to mean if your estimate is wrong and we lose that plant? It’s going to mean your job, that’s what it’s going to mean. My God, do you want to end up carrying your ass home to Mary in a basket? Is that what you want?”

You wouldn’t understand, he thought, because you’d never make a move unless you were covered six ways and had three other fall guys lined up. That’s the way you end up with four hundred thousand in stocks and funds, a Delta 88, and a typewriter that pops out of a desk at you like some silly jack-in-the-box. You stupid fuckstick, I could con you for the next ten years. I just might do it, too.

He gri

“What do you mean?”

Joyously, he lied:

“Thorn McAn had already notified the realtor that they’re not interested in the plant. They had their guys out to look at it and they hollered holy hell. So what you’ve got is my word that the place is shit at four-fifty. What you’ve also got is a ninety-day option that runs out on Tuesday. What you’ve also got is a smart mick realtor named Monohan, who had been bluffing our pants off. It almost worked.”

“What are you suggesting?”

“I’m suggesting we let the option run out. That we stand pat until next Thursday or so. You talk to your boys in cost and accounting about that twenty percent utility hike. I’ll talk to Monohan. When I get through with him, he’ll be down on his knees for two hundred thousand.”

“Bart, are you sure?”

“Sure I am,” he said, and smiled tightly. “I wouldn’t be sticking out my neck if I thought somebody was going to cut it off.”

George, what are you doing???

Shut up, shut up, don’t bother me now.

“What we’ve got here,” he said, “is a smart-ass realtor with no buyer. We can afford to take our time. Every day we keep him swinging in the wind is another day the price goes down when we do buy.”

“All right,” Ordner said slowly. “But let’s have one thing clear, Bart. If we fail to exercise our option and then somebody else does go in there, I’d have to shoot you out of the saddle. Nothing-”

“I know,” he said, suddenly tired. “Nothing personal.”

“Bart, are you sure you haven’t picked up Mary’s bug? You look a little punk tonight.”

You look a little punk yourself, asshole.

“I’ll be fine when we get this settled. It’s been a strain.

“Sure it has.” Ordner arranged his face in sympathetic lines. “I’d almost forgotten… your house is right in the line of fire, too.”

“Yes.”

“You’ve found another place?”

“Well, we’ve got our eye on two. I wouldn’t be surprised if I closed the laundry deal and my personal deal on the same day.”

Ordner gri

“Yes, it’s going to be quite a day.”

On the way home Freddy kept trying to talk to him-scream at him, really-and he had to keep yanking the circuit breaker. He was just pulling onto Crestallen Street West when it burnt out with a smell of frying synapses and overloaded axons. All the questions spilled through and he jammed both feet down on the power brake. The LTD screeched to a halt in the middle of the street, and he was thrown against his seat belt hard enough to lock it and force a grunt up from his stomach.

When he had control of himself, he let the car creep over to the curb. He turned off the motor, killed the lights, unbuckled his seat belt, and sat trembling with his hands on the steering wheel.

From where he sat, the street curved gently, the streetlights making a graceful flashhook of light. It was a pretty street. Most of the houses which now lined it had been built in the postwar period 1946-1958, but somehow, miraculously, it had escaped the Fifties Crackerbox Syndrome, and the diseases that went with it: crumbling foundation, balding lawn, toy proliferation, premature aging of cars, flaking paint, plastic storm windows.

He knew his neighbors-why not? He and Mary had been on Crestallen Street almost fourteen years now. That was a long time. The Upslingers in the house above them; their boy Ke

A nice street, Fred. A nice neighborhood. Oh, I know how the intellectuals sneer at suburbia-it’s not as romantic as the rat-infested tenements or the hale-and-hearty back-to-the-land stuff. There are no great museums in suburbia, no great forests, no great challenges.

But there had been good times. I know what you’re thinking, Fred. Good times, what are good times? There’s no great joy in good times, no great sorrow, no great nothing. Just blah. Backyard barbecues in the summer dusk, everybody a little high but nobody getting really drunk or really ugly. Car pools we got up to go see the Mustangs play. The fucking Musties, who couldn’t even beat the Pats the year the Pats were 1-12. Having people in to di

So bring on the bulldozers, right, Fred? Let’s bury all of that. There’ll be another suburb pretty quick, over in Waterford, where there was nothing but a bunch of vacant lots until this year. The March of Time. Progress in Review. Billion Dollar Babies. So what is it when you go over there to look? A bunch of saltine boxes painted different colors. Plastic pipes that are going to freeze every winter. Plastic wood. Plastic everything. Because Moe at the Highway Commission told Joe down at Joe’s Construction, and Sue who works at the front desk at Joe’s told Lou at Lou’s Construction and pretty soon the big Waterford land boom is on and the developments are going up in the vacant lots, and also the high rises, the condominiums. You get a house on Lilac Lane, which intersects Spain Lane going north and Dain Lane going south. You can pick Elm Street, Oak Street, Cypress Street, White Pine Blister Street. Each house has a full bathroom downstairs, a half-bathroom upstairs, and a fake chimney on the east side. And if you come home drunk you can’t even find your own fucking house.

But George-

Shut up, Fred, I’m talking. And where are your neighbors? Maybe they weren’t so much, those neighbors, but you knew who they were. You knew who you could borrow a cup of sugar from when you were tapped out. Where are they? Tony and Alicia Lang are in Mi